[Kal-EL]

Radeon HD 4890 X2 a Reality On The Basis of Performance Against Competitor
AMD is attempting to revive its competitiveness that took a beating with NVIDIA's introduction of 55 nm G200b-based graphics accelerators. The method AMD seems to be adopting is by giving its existing flagship GPU, the RV770, a series of design improvements that facilitate higher clock-speeds, in turn, better performance on offer.

A lot has been said about RV790 till date, with each commentator coming up with a new version of the story. It has been more or less established that the RV790 will be a improvement over the RV770, though not a revolutionary one. Fresh information gathered by PC Games Hardware places a realistic estimate on up to where RV790 is going to push the performance envelope for AMD.

It is suggested that RV790 will revive direct competition with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260, post the company's remodeling of the SKU by enabling 216 stream processors against 192 on its original specs. With the single-GPU flagship accelerator based on the RV790: Radeon HD 4890 competing with GeForce GTX 260 (216 SP), one would wonder if the company would work on a dual-GPU accelerator. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 emerged as the fastest dual-GPU accelerator, outperforming ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, although it achieved that by using two G200b cores with all their 240 stream processors enabled. This leaves a tough task for AMD to design a card that outperforms GTX 295, considering the higher clock-speeds the RV790 comes with, ideally, only pushes the performance of the single-GPU card by 8~20 per cent. While there are no technical challenges the company faces in designing a dual-RV790 accelerator, it will do so only if it is able to outperform the GeForce GTX 295. AMD's add-in board partners (AIBs), most probably will be left to design their own dual-RV790 cards, much in the same way AMD left it to them, to design the Radeon HD 4850 X2.

From AMD's end, it seems like the company is treating the "X2" moniker as an object of prestige, that it would not want to tarnish by releasing something that falls behind its competitor in terms of performance. The HD 3870 X2 outperformed its then competitor, the GeForce 8800 GTX, followed by HD 4870 X2 outperforming GeForce GTX 280.

Source: PC Games Hardware

[Gunslinger]

Is there no more info on this since the op? Seems they should be on the horizon....

[Kal-EL]

Everybody went "Mums" da word on this. My crystal ball says it'll be a BLAM! release, in your face!
Who knows, hopefully it'll be here by winter.

[hellcamino]

Last I heard the new 5 series was going to be out most likely this fall. As a side note I love how some reviewers act like ATi had a brief run of competition with nVidia as opposed to pwning them for about 9 months before nVidia came up with something competitive.

We truly need to get into the reviewing end of things so peeps can get honest reviews, I read all of the reviews I could find on i7 vs 775 and AM3 as well as ATi vs nVidia and of course ssd vs standard mechanical hdd.

The truth: i7's aren't even close to the performance of ANY LGA775 based cpu...they absolutely destroy all of them and make them call the new king "Daddy".

I've not personally used the newer nVidia cards myself and so I cannot give a first hand review but I do know a lot of people who bought them and then went and got a pair of 4000 series cards to use instead.

SSD's are a real topic of argument, the cheap ssd's I'm told aren't that great ...I wonder. I do have a pair of OcZ Vertex 30gb drives myself as well as 3x74gb raptors that have been relegated to my games/apps drive. The reason for this is simple, the ssd's absolutely SPANK the raptors in performance. I haven't tested write times but I have tested read times a bit. Most reviewers would have you believe that you need to do all kinds of magic tricks to your drives to get any speed out of them and that even then they barely beat conventional drives.

The reality: The OcZ Vertex 30gb drives I use without any configuration outside of my RAID bios are typically more than twice as fast as my THREE raptors in RAID0...Weird huh? Oh and I have as yet to bork a windows install due to hard os crashes, I bought them with that thought in mind figuring that I would lose a bit of speed but stop borking my os due to COD WaW continuously crashing. I was wrong thinking I would lose some speed and I was 100% right on the reliability improvement, it's pretty tough to spin ssd's out of sync

End rant\ Seriously though, I don't know what is needed to get samples into the hands of unbiased reviewers (such as myself) but I will be looking into it.

[Kal-EL]

Originally Posted by hellcamino

Last I heard the new 5 series was going to be out most likely this fall.

Even better.

[Chuchnit]

Originally Posted by Kal-EL

Even better.

Prolly a smart move by them really. They sold tons of 4870x2 last year and early this year. They have the 4890 now. They didn't need to waist any money on releasing another highend card just a couple months before releasing DX11 5000 series cards. AMD/ATI have came up with some amazing products in the last year. They need to proserve cash and keep pumping out amazing new products. Then they can be like nvidia and rebrand/rehash everything.:p

[Kal-EL]

Originally Posted by Chuchnit

Prolly a smart move by them really. They sold tons of 4870x2 last year and early this year. They have the 4890 now. They didn't need to waist any money on releasing another highend card just a couple months before releasing DX11 5000 series cards. AMD/ATI have came up with some amazing products in the last year. They need to proserve cash and keep pumping out amazing new products. Then they can be like nvidia and rebrand/rehash everything.:p

I don't think they are wasting money, I know just about everyone with a wallet would run out and pick up the 4890x2's immediately. Then the 5xxx would be released and double whammmy for your mammmmy.